Hier, je suis arrivé à Copenhagen

A pleased bike rider meeting his host after a long ride

A bridge not too far - crossing to Fehmarn in the early morning

Approaching Rødbyhavn and Denmark whilst eating my buffet breakfast

Yes! It really is Denmark

I awoke very early as you do in a tent and, conscious of the need for serious distance and a ferry crossing, I left the camping ground at 6.30 am, my earliest start ever. Don´t worry, I had paid the bill the night before.

I crossed the bridge and the German island of Fehmarn by about 8.00 am and managed to get on a big Scanline ferry just before it departed. The ferry had a great buffet breakfast which I tucked into as I watched the small Danish port of Rødbyhavn approach (it is a 45 min trip).

With a good buffet breakfast under my belt and an added danish pastry tucked into my bag for later, I was first off the boat. It was then across the islands of Lolland and Falster and on to the main island of Zealand. Given that this is a Danish keyboard (that makes five different key boards so far) the actual name is Sjælland. This keyboard also allows me to type å so I will try to find and excuse to use this character as well. Just for the record, if you think you can speak good Danish, the Danes will test you with a word with ø in it. It is almost certain you will fail this test.

Zealand is a big island and I wanted to reach the home of my friends Baun (Buller) and Jette Christensen that night. To do this I cheated and accepted Baun´s offer to meet me in Køge which is within the Greater Copenhagen urban area. This still required riding 147 km that day, which is a record for me. Again I was assisted by strong tail winds and benign road and bike path conditions. Still, the more you ride the more breaks you need and the more sore a certain neck muscle gets. Needless to say, I was very glad to see Buller and Jette at Køge railway station.

Buller and I worked together in 1979 in Hong Kong and we are both water resources engineers. He works for a design and construct group called Kruger now owned by the French company Veolia. Jette is an accountant doing tax work as accountants are inclined to do.

As a reminder of the passing of time, Jette and Buller had two little girls in Hong Kong, Britt who was about 6 and Rie about 2. Britt is now a civil engineer with a PhD in groundwater and a baby boy and Rie has just graduated as a medical doctor and is pregnant.

The last ice age formed both the Schleswig-Holstein and Danish landscape of low undulating topography. The Danish islands have less undulation but enough to make it hard going late in the day when tiredness has set in.

Interestingly, I am seeing much the same crops as I first saw in France a month ago with the exception of what appears to be rye grass. Of course, Schleswig-Holstein has plenty of Schleswig-Holstein cows. Europe is one giant granary it would appear.

Denmark has almost no rivers and close to 100% of the water supply comes from groundwater. Convenient in that there is no need for storages, it is already stored in the ground.

It is amazing what a shower and dinner can do to revive the spirits. At 9.30 pm we watched the final of European Cup with Germany playing Spain. I put on the German scarf bought in Lubeck but like all my other adopted teams it, was the "kiss of death" as they lost 1-0 to Spain. I, and the entire German people can be consoled with the fact that Spain were clearly the best team of this European Cup.

Lubeck - le jour dernier, ou est le soleil?

Grossenboden beach and bathing boxes - don´t think the ad is for ice cream

Dogs do it too

Gossenboden -sanitary heaven, ja!

Home away from home

Far from the madding crowd

I had intended leaving Lubeck early but it was raining so I took the opportunity to have a quick look at the City Museum, which contains some good 19th century German landscape work plus a lot of fine funiture coming from the homes of the rich merchants of the 17th to 19th century. Certainly beat riding in the rain.

Also bought some of the famous Lubecker marzipan (as endorsed by Bill Hansen) for my impending Danish hosts. I was reassured that the shop I found was the best marzipan store in Lubeck as the sales people were a bit on the snooty side al la Prue and Trude.

Leaving Lubeck about noon, I made the usual slow progress getting out of town. However, both the weather and pace picked up as I rode north across the very pretty rural rolling countryside of Holstein (Schleswig-Holstein). I was aided by very good bike path surfaces (indistinguishable from carpet in places) and a strong tail wind. I ended up doing 80 km in spite of the late start and pitched a tent in a "mega" campsite at Grossenbrode on the Baltic coast at the northern tip of mainland Germany. Only a small island and a ferry remained before Denmark.

The campsite and there are many others (I counted 42 on my map in just the area west of Keil and north of Lubeck) along this Baltic Coastline are mainly for what appears to be permanent or semi-permanent caravans and their "add ons". These add-ons include enclosed extensions, sheds, garden gnomes, flower beds and lawned or paved well equipped and provisioned (barbeques, etc) terraces.

At my campsite there are 520 such sites. Next to the amenities block there is a small patch of lawn for tents. That is okay because mine was the only tent that night and I was right next to the most important feature of the camping ground, the amenities block! This, by the way, was amazingly clean and modern in a packaged sort of way. It even had a dog wash facility.

I arrived on the first day of the German school holidays. The manager told me that he hoped the rather quiet camping ground would soon be abuzz as the people from the big Ruhr cities of Dusselldorf, Dortmund, etc, slowly made their way north to these "homes away from home".

Personally, I would rather be back in Dortmund with a good book than with all this intensity but, what would I know, as I don´t come from Dortmund. I wonder what Prue and who would think.

The intensity extends to a string of restaurants and bathing boxes along the nearby beach. I had a very nice fish meal with two good german beers in quiet and pleasant surroundings. Hopefully, for the campsite manager, this quietness will be vanquished within a day or so.

The Baltic Sea looked wonderfully clear and the sand very fine and white. I would imagine this area would not have much surf as the prevailing winds are westerly to this east facing coastline.

Oh, the sun did finally appear by the late afternoon.

Lübeck - la reine des port Hanseatic

Holsentor - the gateway to Lubeck

Marienkirch exterior

Marienkirch interior

Well that is what the guidebook says. Who am I to disagree. It is a pretty cool city. A lot of people get around on bikes here so it must have something.

Just to bore you briefly with a bit of history. Lübeck started out as a Slav settlement around the 11 th century but really hit it´s straps in the 13th to 15th centuries as a Hanseatic trading city linking northern and eastern Europe with western and southern Europe. It helped that it had a special remit and protection from the Emperor. One of the big items of trade was salt and the salt storehouses are directly opposite my hotel room. They called it white gold!

The city´s power waned with the onset of the Industrial Revolution. This probably protected all the marvellous architecture of the city in a bit of a time warp until the 2nd WW. In 1942 allied bombers firebombed the city. Perhaps to practice their skills for the later Dresden bombing. None of this was needed in a military sense and in my view was a disgrace.

Post war, a good proportion of the public buildings including the magnificent Marienkirch were reconstructed and, from the 60´s through to now, restoration of ordinary homes followed as well as sympathetic more modern construction. The result is a very attractive old city retaining it´s medieval street layout and surrounded by water.

I haven´t seen all I wanted to (the laundry is important too) but I have had a good taste of it. Marienkirch is a magnificent Gothic Cathedral of brick is probably the highlight but there are many other great buildings. (photos later).

Bill has said to try Lübeck marzipan but I forgot because I was obsessed about the laundry. I realise now that marzipan is more important than laundry. Sorry to rabbit on about the laundry.

Le Vélo et Le Train

This posting is about what makes travel so interesting, the unpredictability.

Approaching Lübeck and becoming less and less enamoured with German footpaths, I thought of catching a train from about 20 km out. At the large town I had intended to do this, I saw no sign to the Bahnhof, so I rode on.

A few miles further my front brakes failed which reinvigorated my train catching plan. I made for another station in a smaller town called Reinfeld where I also thought I might find a repair shop to look at the brakes. In the main street, my gaze fell on a fellow aged bike rider (photo to follow). He was not from this place but he kindly rode around with me asking several people the location of a bike shop. This done he returned to his friend and the coffee stop he had intended.

The problem proved simple to fix so I had time to go back and thank him again. Over a coffee which he bought, we discussed journeys, bikes and gear. They were within a day from home near Kiel after a tour around Germany.

The point of this story, is the proposition of what would have happened if this bike rider had not just "appeared" in my gaze.

Another similar event, the same day was at the train station. It was unmanned and the set of stairs making up the underpass to the central platform looked formidable. My mind was on abandoning the idea but decided to look for someone in this unmanned but formidable looking train station. I pressed a button and a man in lycra opened the door of what looked like a locker room. He told me in perfect English that the train would take a bike and unfortunately the stairs were the only access. He also said that there was a train to Lübeck in a few minutes.

With this encouragement and the adrenalin arising from the soon-to-arrive train, I managed the fully ladened bike down and up the set of underpass stairs to arrive the platform just as the train approached.

As I was about to board the train, I looked over to the station building and the man in lycra came out and we gave each other the thumbs up! Why was he there? I will never know, but there he was!

In ten minutes, I was in the centre of Lübeck and in another 30 minutes looking out onto this view ( photo later). This is the very comfortable Hotel Jensen in the heart of the old city.

Je suis arrivé à Lübeck - Les fatigues du voyage!

Since I left Roy at Zwartlois just north of Zwolle in Holland´s biblebelt (so Roy tells me), it seems a long time but that was only Sunday. In four days I rode 450 km and that is probably enough. Today I ended up close to Lübeck so it was easy to get here by lunchtime. Made easier because I took the train for the last 10 km! Just to see how it was.

Lubeck is a fantastic city but more on that in a later posting. Ironically, the hectic riding was aimed at avoiding cities, particularly the big one - Hamburg. I rode through northern Holland, Northwest Germany threading my way between the cities of Oldernburg, Bremen, Bremerhaven and Hamburg. Even the towns are a pain in Germany because they have labelled the footpaths bikepaths and they arn´t and they shake the hell out of my bike and me! Very wearing. Almost as bad as getting used to this German keyboard which has z where the y should be and vice versa.

However the countryside is great and on the smaller roads when I was "allowed" on the road I made good progress with generally tail winds and no rain. This area is fantastically rich agriculturally. I am planning a separate posting which will be labelled "La pastorale". I bet everyone is dying to read it. Yeh, whatever!

One of the reasons I felt so tired may have been that I camped on three of the four nights and sleep is difficult when the light doesn´t really go until 11 pm and it is light at 5.00 am. Some nights I can hear roosters at 4.00 am. The other night was at a Gasthaus which was interesting as no one spoke any English. However more on that later as i am planning a posting on accomodation. Yeh whatever! It was here I had the best breakfast I have had. More on this later as I am planning a posting on the best of this and that. Yeh, whatever!

After finding a nice hotel here, having a shower and lunch of asparagus soup (the Northern Europeans are big on asparagus and it is in season as I know from having camped on an asparagus farm) and English Breakfast tea (i am really a coffee man but tea is great for dehydration), the fatigue ebbed away enough for a quick wander. I think I am getting quite fit but still climbing the stairs of the main land mark the Holsentor, made me puff. Strange, I guess it is different muscles. Sophie, as a budding physio, what is your view?

I will stay two nights here just to rest up and because it is such a nice place. I also need to do some washing and it is really at the end of five socks and undies ration. Some may say too much info.

The AFL footy sounds miserable so I am no longer interested. The "World" game is the go. In Holland everyone was driving around with flags stuck to their cars (well not Roy) and now in Germany I see everyone drives round with flags stuck to their cars. Of course the Germans are still winning so in keeping with my position of being with the winner - Deutschland uber Europa!

These patterns suggest that whilst the buildings and landscape change across Europe, the people are doing the same things. That is, they drive around with flags stuck to their cars, they watch innane morning and daytime TV just as we do.

On Saturday, I will start the move north to Copenhagen which may not be reached until Monday. I am looking forward to this particularly catching up with my old and good Danish friends. But tomorrow is a layday.

I bet you have alway wanted to do the German ß - well there I can with this kezboard! Before zou laugh the y was deliberate! Oops.

L'Orange! C'est la debacle!

The Old Lower House of Parliament, The Hague


Mauritshuis - The girl with the pearl earring and I

Anke in front of the herring shop

Typical Street in The Hague

Saturday and old men in lycra relaxing after their cycling - it could be Melbourne

When in Holland do as the Dutch do!

Yesterday, my last at Renkum, we went to The Hague. This is the seat of government and where Roy grew up and in part so did Anke. It is a lovely city with trams reminding me a little of home. We visited some of their friends and spent time at the Mauritshuis Museum, drinking on the Plein (the Square) ending the trip with a nice Indonesian meal including Anke's brother Henk who was recently in Australia. Roy and Anke have very strong personal and professional bonds with Indonesia.

A great final day for me but not for the Dutch people whose team was beaten by a Guus Hiddink lead Russia in the quarter finals of the European Cup. Oh well, at least this house is philosophical about it.

Crossing the Rhine

Tomorrow, I head north into Protestant Europe. The Rhine is the boundary between Catholic and Protestant Europe and so from tomorrow I cannot expect anymore assistance from the numerous grottos to Jesus and Our Lady that have guided my from the roadsides all the way up to here.

To date I have been dividing responsibilities so that I look after keeping on the right hand side of the road and they look after my doing anything else that might be regarded as inappropriate or silly.

Perhaps, I should adopt the general Protestant viewpoint and take total responsibility for my actions. What a scary thought!

Visiting the Kroller-Muller Museum near Renkum

Perhaps my favourite Van Gogh

Getting ready to visit the fantastic Kroller-Muller Museum and finding out about the difference between fine art of the 16th and late 19th/early 20th Century!

The Kroller-Muller museum focusses on impressionist and post impressionist art. It has a million Van Goghs (exaggerating) and a useful number of Monet, Pissarro, etc and some fantastic sculptures including a Moore. This art was put together by an extremely wealthy German-Dutch industrial family in the early part of the 20th century (you guessed it the Kroller-Mullers!). All this was given to the Dutch Government when they went broke and includes 6000 ha of land which has been converted into a fantastic nature reserve.

The land is a moraine deposit from the last Ice Age. During the Middle Ages was over-grazed (sheep and people what a deadly combination) and ended up with large parts that were basically sand dunes. The Kroller-Mullers bought it as a hunting reserve. Now it is home to a wide diversity of wild vegetation and animals with the feature animal being a large European Red Deer.

The Kroller-Muller home is an interesting example of Art Deco but I still prefer the Heidelberg Town Hall.

Perhaps a model of Mokoan in terms of restoration, not the Red Deer! Also, get someone to whack a few hundred Brackes, Whiteleys and Nolans into the Yacht Club.

It is interesting to ride through such extensive areas of wild countryside which is such a contrast to neat and tidy extensively cultivated or urbanised Holland.

En ce qui concerne voyage seule

Some, particularly women, remark about my travelling alone. I must say that my preference would be to have a companion. However, if I had waited until someone became available it might not ever happen. Equally, I am not a big fan of group bike trips of which there are numerous particular around this time with the onset of the Tour de France. So, the issue is how to make the best of this deficiency.

One solution is to talk to yourself! I do do this from time to time particularly when a crossroads is reached and there is need of a decision of which way to go. However, I hope I can keep this under control. I am reminded of a great Jack Nicholson movie where he plays a cop who becomes obsessed about catching a child molester/murderer. Something goes wrong and there is a great last scene where Jack is sitting on a sand blown abandoned gas station step muttering intensely to himself.

Another way is to meet people. This can't be arranged but you can make the best of the opportunities that come quite unexpectedly. One example is my encounter with Michel and Suzanne.

It was late in the day and I had just come out of the tourist information centre and the afternoon sun was streaming into the beautiful tree lined square of Maaseik, a medieval town in Belgium on the border with Holland. My mind was on accomodation to the north in Holland, when Michel made a joke in Flemish about my bike looking like a Belgium postal bike. Realising I was a foreigner, he called me over and insisted on shouting me a beer and of course a chat about pretty well everything. On a personal note, it turned out that Suzanne's son of 37 years old objected to their relationship so, while he was on holiday in the Caribbean, they were stealing a few moments together. The story gets even more tragic but nevermind, we had a good laugh and we all enjoyed the few hours we chatted and drank before I finally got moving again. If I had left it to Michel, I might still be there but not in any condition to tell the tale.

Earlier that day, as I sauntered along a levee bank cycle path (yes, there are lots), an 80 year old (I think thats what he said but surely he was riding too fast for that!) came up beside me and started to chat. We discovered our "common" language was French so you can imagine how basic the conversation was. Nevertheless, as we parted ways, we thanked each other and meant it.

I have just had a horrible thought that perhaps Suzanne's son is a blogger. No, surely there are better things to do in the Carribean!

It is time to collect the bike from the local shop where I am sure the servicing will be excellent.

Je suis arrivé à Renkum il ya un jour

Roy and I in readiness

I arrived in Renkum, which is just west of Arnhem on the Rhine, yesterday. It was a leasurily trip up from south of Nijmegen with the last bit being on top of a Rhine levee with a bit of head wind. I have been very lucky with the weather since arriving in the Netherlands four days ago.

Cycling in Holland is so easy. It is generally flat, although winds sometimes make up for the flatness, and most of the larger roads have completely separated cycle paths. On the smaller rural roads it doesn't matter as there are very few cars. Also, the road surfaces are immaculate. One of the ironies of Holland is that it has perhaps the highest concentration of cycle paths and freeways of anywhere in the World.

I am staying a few days with Anke and Roy who are the sister and brother-in-law of Linda Hansen. I have to leave after a few days otherwise I will get too used to their magnificent hospitality! Life wasn't meant to be this easy! Today, it is raining so I am also fortunate from that score.

On Saturday, we will go to the Hague and visit a fine arts museum with the odd Dutch Master including Vermeer's the Girl with Pearl Earring which was the subject of a recent film which I haven't seen, although I am a fan of the old Scarlett.

On Saturday night we will watch Holland play Russia in the quarterfinals of the European Cup. Russia has Guus Hiddink as coach so whichever way, the Dutch will get a win. It is compulsory viewing here as Anke is a bit of a football tragic. Well, the whole country is a bit tragic in this regard. Holland is playing well and everywhere there is orange bunting and the national flag with the expression "hup hup" hung out on flag poles which most houses have. It is about as anarchic as this country can get.

On Sunday, regardless of the result I leave for the north and hopefully more sunshine. The immediate destination is Groningen and old university town and then into Germany on the way to Denmark.

La riviere travailleuse - la Meuse

The Meuse rises on the western edge of the Vosge Mountains in Eastern France near Nancy and flows roughly north into Belgium and becomes the Mass on entering Holland. This is the river I had such difficulty following as I entered Belgium. However north of Namur I found a bike path running right along the bank of the river. This has made a big difference to progress. It is not a dedicated bike lane but rather a paved access route that bikes are allowed access to. It's real purpose is access for industry because the Meuse is a 'working river'. This is not the type of 'working river' that my friends in Riverhealth know about. No, it is not a river that has it's flow pattern completely reversed and flow reduced to 25%. That's more appropriately termed a disaster!

The Meuse has heavy barge traffic often more than 100 metres long, it has numerous quarries, Nuclear power plants, cement factories, steel mills. In one location I was riding through coal slurry. Yet for all of this, there are parts that a spectacularly scenic. From Namur to Liege, the Meuse flows through a gorge of dramatic mudstone cliffs.

At Liege, I lost the bike path. Negotiating big cities is always problematic with a bike. At one stage I was on a freeway! Fortunately it was Saturday afternoon and traffic was light. Central Liege is a bit of a construction site at the moment as they are building a big new railway station. It is a big industrial and transport centre linking Germany with the ports of Antwerp and Rotterdam. In spite or perhaps because of it, the central area along the river is very elegant with lots of stylish apartment blocks facing the water and rows of plane trees. Rather like an extended top end of Collins Street.

The river by this stage is about 150 metres wide and looks reasonably clean. However, I don't know if looks is enough!

Je suis arrivé en Pay-Bas, il y a un jour

Me, my bike and MSR tent

It's a windmill, it must be Holland

I crossed the border late Saturday afternoon after a good run up to Liege and beyond it. Entering Holland, suddenly there were barrier separated bike lanes. It was so amazing I fell off my bike! I guess the Legoland landscape (everything seems to fit just right) made me relaxed. Still two good things out of it - the Dutch also have gravel and I got to use the first aid kit.

I camped in a small but fully provisioned campsite just a few kilometres in from the border. Fully provisioned means a restaurant that serves a good evening meal and and amazing breakfast. Today i rode into Maastricht which is only 10 km from the camp ground. Really this is bikers dreamland. And they are everywhere. I don't feel 'special' anymore and that's a good thing. Maastricht is a pretty little town and I just pottered around, drank a beer, ate a waffle and went to a couple of museums. It is great to have a bike to get around these smaller cities.

The Dutch are doing very well in the European Cup. Linda are you excited? I am going for the Dutch partly because my good cycling gear is orange and partly because as a Magpie supporter it expect but don't often get success. I trust we dismissed Carlton.

Linda, please tell Roy and Anke, I hope to be in Renkum by Wednesday.

I have now done 1000 km.

En ce qui concerne de la jambe

The New Zealand Monument at Le Quesnoy

On Wednesday I started off again! The very nice people at Hotel de France had been great but i think they needed the room. It was in anycase time to move on. I left Cambrai in good order and riding seemed not affected by the cramps (yes Sophie I now know it was only cramp but at the time i thought it was terminal. I did see some signs for physios - kino something).

I made LeQuesnoy in good time for lunch. With bagette in hand, I viewed a perfect Vauben fort which I discovered New Zealanders scaled and liberated the town about a week before the Armistice. I would have stayed at camp. No wonder they play rugby!

From the bureau de tourism i found out a lot about the area relating to large national parks and crafts such as glass making. But it was time to more on!

With good weather I made Bavay (another Vauban fort - he apparently had a bit of a monopoly in the military architect department. Finally I reached Mauberge which is within five miles of the Belgian border. I camped out of town at a nice camping ground because the town centre was very ordinary.

The next day the weather turned bad and it rained and rained. I had planned to ride through small villages on the right bank of the Sambre and thus avoid the big steel city of Charleroi and also the hills of the Ardenne. In theory thiswas right but I hadn't reckoned on the rain and the poor Belgian sign posting. In France every road is numbered and with the wonderful Michelin maps it is very easy to find your way even via very small rural roads. Of course wearing glasses doesn't help in the rain! At lunch time at a town on the Sambre i met a very nice South African couple who invited me back to their boat! They spend 4 months wandering the waterways of europe and 8 months back in South Africa. Had a nice yarn but then as the rain started again I had to be off! It got more and more difficult and by 5.30 I realised I could not make Namur. By good fortune, I found a hotel in a small village. Also, the standard and price where a cut above what I have been used to. However given my condition it was worth every euro.

Today, Friday I had a leasurily ride into Namur and spent the day wandering around. It is a lovely old university town. Perhaps more on it later. I must now pick up my things at the bureau de tourism and ride 20 km to a B and B. By tomorrow I should be in Holland.

Belgium is an interesting country that is effectively dived in two. This is the French speaking area (Wallonia) and all the language is French. Don't bother about Flemish!

The heading doesn't relate much to the post but I wanted to practice saying "regarding"!

Au revoir

Preparée à la direction du nord

Today I wandered around the old city along a mapped route. The leg is improving rapidly but I am still hobbling a little. Still better than watching daytime TV, which whilst good for learning French is, as it is at home, the new opiate of the people at best and just plain mind numbing at worst.

I wonder who else spotted an embarassing typo a few postings ago. Vince did and now it is corrected!

Another brief word on food and bike travelling. I deliberately did not plan to carry food except for chocolate and a few pieces of fruit. This creates a small difficulty on the backroads where many of the villages don't even have a bakery andifthey do they don't sell sandwich bagettes like the do in large towns. So, where this happens it's chocolate and fruit! Bear in mind the chocolate is 70% and very goodfor you.

A parting few generalisations about the French. I think they are a wonderfully practical people with a delightfully ironic sense of humour. They have laughed with me and not against me about my stumbling French. Two small criticisms: the young, particularly the femmes smoke too much and there is too liberal a view to dog shit. Jim would love it but I think an element of fascist control is in order over this latter issue. Of course as for contolling women - that is an entirely different issue!

After these generalisations I am allowed back.

Cambrai et autrechose

Busy Busy Cambrai!

I am stuck in Cambrai! Still, not a bad plce to be as i contemplate life over a Belgian beer in a sidewalk cafe near the town square.

I have what I best describe as permanent cramp in my left leg which makes it difficult to walk. Fortunately, there is no ligement damage. I had fun finding and seeing a docter. He was nice, he smiled at my craziness and said adter two days of anti inflamatories I should be right to continue. such a relief! I will continue more slowly. Unfortunately the weather now is great for cycling although perhaps a little too warm.

Cambrai is a frontier medieval town with a nice feel. I have done some walks (more hobbles really) and discovered it was quite a religious centre untill the revolution. It even harboured english nuns for two centuries post the reformation. I met a canadian guy who was studing the role in we"stern literature. He wondered why Australians voted for john howard. Not sure he was convinced with my answer but was too polite to defer. Anyway, enjoyable conversation over a beer on a Sunday afternoon.

Cambrai was part of the Spanish Netherlands until Louis 14 changed that. The churches are a somber form of Baroque. One of the main ones has a Rubens. There is a touch of Flemish coming into the architecture.

On Wednesday, I hope to get to Mauberge close to the Belgian border.

Je suis arrivé à Cambrai il y a deux heure!

Australian War Memorial and Commonwealth War Cemetary and Villers-Bretonneux

Firstly, apologies for the delay in postings. It has been raining for two full days and I was stuck in Albert. I didn't mind because it was good to take it a bit slowly.

Since the last posting I have visited all the Commonwealth monuments except the Canadian. Sorry Canada, but I have war monument overdose and in any case it isn't quite in the direction I want to go.

I have met some interesting people over the last few days including some Australians at the Villers-Bretonneux as you would expect. But Carol and Max from Queensland didn't know, they satiated my need to communicate en Anglais. I was also nice to share our feelings about the place. I also met a lady from Perth Kath. I resisted the desire to say "do you know my sister?" However she did sound like she might be in your circle!

In Albert, I was sitting in a bar having a "petite cafe" (as you do) on the morning I left and a journalist from the local paper chatted with me and thre may be an article. Get ready to purchase your copy of the Picardy Express. We decided John Howard was terrible and we doubted anyone would vote for Sarkosy. However, our little mutual leftist admiration society was shattered by the bar owner declaring he voted for Sarkosy! All in good fun.

It is inter'esting that my lisyening comprehension is improving but it needed to. Still a bit slow on the spoken side without preparation.

Another word on the food. I have decided to eat simply while traveling. I have tried the region "better" restaurants with the set dinners for 20 to 30 E and have found the food a bit old fashioned and the restaurant decore out of Faulty Towers. In these regional areas there seems to be tendency to boil the vegetables to death a la ma mere. However there was one great exception. It is all probly my ignorance as to where to go. I will probably stick to the brasseries in the town square from now on.

Today, I rode from Albert to Cambrai through light mist with the bike as silent as the wind. I think I am leaving the granary and heading into "pomme terre" country. A source of mirth for my classmates when I confused pomme terre with pomme. In the time I have been here, the barley is starting to turn a shade of brown. I like to end on this qgricultural note.

Tomorrow i hope to get close to the Belgium border. I am a little uneasy to enter these wild northern areas! Sorry only joking! In any case it will be French speaking Belgium.

Sorry for the mistakes - still no qwaty keyboard.

Je suis arrivé à Amien il ya a un jour!

The grave of the Rev A E Goller at Templeux - He is Bill Hansen's Grandfather

Ah the agony and the ectasy of travel! Yesterday i cycled 100 km and it was eventful!

it started well as i cycled north to visit the grave of Bill Hansen's grandfather. J'ai trouvé! even found bills comment in the book from 2006. I guess that means not many visitors. Your comment bill was good - short and to the point and Campbell would be proud. Not like some of your BE clauses! Mine, in contrast, was full of anti-war claptrap.

I reached Peronne in good enough condition but the old fatigée was mounting. Also, I had seen to many graves by then. I decided to take le rue rouge to make up time. However the big trucks were forcing me into the gravel and i got a flat tyre courtesy of a small stone flint. After this I pushed hqrd but noticed that the chain was slipping. Alors, c'est tres désagréable!

Anyway I got to the bureau du tourism ten minutes before closing, totally exhausted. There the nice young man told me all the hotels were full! Pourquoi? Anyway, he told where the camping ground was and in ten minutes i was there! In éà more minutes, after a shower and settinng up the tent etc I was a new man. Fancy only this day i was inwardly begrudging bringing the camping gear. The MSR tent is fantastic and only 2 kg. no more complaints. Ce matins, I had a nice plat de jour and café. My bik is also resting and will by the time i go back for it have new chain and gears. The guys in Melbourne don't know how hard i pus the chain and thought it would wait until i got back.

For those such as bill who want to know about food. Je mange bien! This still a country that knows about food.

A final word about Gothic cathedrals. I have seen Laon, Riems and Amiens - fantastique!

Au revoir

Je suis arrivé à St Quentin!

A typical French village, I have fogotten where - taken for the 2CV which looks in greater order

Today was a very long day and rainy! I took small and indirect roads from a small village of st croix north of Reims. I had stayed at a chambre d'hote (b and b). met an english couple brian and jill and disscussed most of the issues of today and solve about half! Just good have a long chat with some one. The chambre d'hote was fanstastic but the world of the tourist is to keep moving.

Tomorrow I will see Bill's grand father's grave and then down the Somme in the reverse direction of Monash's final advance. Hope to reach Amien tomorrow afternoon.

Today I briefly visited Laon, a medieval city located 200 metres above the plain. The climb up and the long indirect route to St Quentin mean I will sleep well tonight!